[Truffaut's] films have a clarity and ease achieved only with a technique so mastered that it has become subconscious; it accommodates without strain the astonishing range of his interests. Truffaut is serious about his art, indeed a perfectionist, but he strikes no postures….

[In The Last Metro] Truffaut has put together a convincing vision of how the Parisians reacted toward their oppressors and toward the French jackals who ran with that pack….

That vision was composed of both hatred and fear, but felt and expressed, he persuades us, primarily as disgust and contempt. Everyone in the film adjusts to the situation—the huge, seemingly bland Bernard least of all. (p. 284)

Collaboration was for years thereafter, and perhaps still is, a painful and confused issue with the French. That is so, if I understand Truffaut correctly, because everyone was a collaborator in some degree. To survive was to collaborate...